


In which Rodney is tired and confused (and John Sheppard is a mystery for the ages)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Coda, Episode: s01e16 The Brotherhood, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Pre-Slash, the thought process of a man with two phds and zero sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 14:38:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20798255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Sheppard is just sitting there, in the candlelight in the medieval-looking room in his tac gear with his gravity-defying hair, not even looking at Rodney. He’s chewing on some bread. His expression is archly innocent.Rodney’s sluggish brain tries to kick into gear, refuses, sputters to a halt and then suddenly makes a giant, dizzying leap. “Are you hitting on me?” he asks.





	In which Rodney is tired and confused (and John Sheppard is a mystery for the ages)

**Author's Note:**

> So just before the summer I watched all five seasons of SGA. It wasn’t until season 3 or so that I really started shipping John and Rodney, buuuut that bit in The Brotherhood (1.16), where John goes “which bed might that be?” after Rodney says he’s going to sleep? That bit made me go HA and want to write fic even all the way back then. In the end it took many months, but tonight I randomly sat down and wrote this in maybe two hours, so, hey, here’s some SGA fic. 
> 
> This is also my hundreth fic on ao3! The perfect time to sneak into a new fandom. 🎂
> 
> For context: in the actual episode, when Rodney says he’s headed for bed and John asks “which bed might that be?”, John is alluding to the fact that the woman Rodney has been working with on the alien planet they’re on has a crush on him, which Rodney hadn’t noticed and the team then teases him about a little. It’s a lighthearted, pretty cute scene, but I kind of felt there was a different way that could have gone, so that’s this fic.

It’s late and even a genius needs sleep — _especially_ a genius, Rodney would dare posit, because his brain is the one that everyone else relies on to save their asses daily and solve ridiculously intricate (but kind of thrilling, he’ll admit) ancient puzzles that will lead them to a direly needed ZedPM. Which, really, is also just a way of saving asses, so yeah — sleep. And asses. They’re strangely connected.

Rodney doesn’t so much ponder this as lets his brain have one of those rare, leisurely moments where it shifts and drifts through mostly nonsense thoughts all on its own. It’s been a very long day, and most days in the Pegasus galaxy are very long, but he’s shamefully relieved that Allina suggested of her own accord that he might want to catch some sleep, because it prevents the increasingly inevitable problem that he could black out right where he sits. He does that often enough on Atlantis, but there are no cute and reasonably intelligent puzzle-enthusiast alien female scientists there to see him drool while he sleeps. The stakes are not as high.

The point being- The point being, probably, that he both wants and needs sleep, so he’s already halfway there mentally — meaning on any available horizontal surface, because he’s far enough gone that he doesn’t even care if it’s just one of the straw mattresses they’d all been assigned earlier that will kill his back — when he passes the table where Sheppard, Teyla and Ford sit, eating and probably just pretending to still be doing some kind of work.

“I’m heading to bed,” he tells them as he plods past, mostly so they’ll know where to find him if the Wraith come calling, or something equally scary that they’ll need to shoot at for him. He doesn’t really look their way.

“Which bed might that be?” Sheppard asks.

“Ha,” Rodney says, pausing to acknowledge Sheppard’s joke or whatever, before he realizes that it’s really a lot of whatever and very little joke. He frowns and turns back. “What?”

Sheppard is just sitting there, in the candlelight in the medieval-looking room in his tac gear with his gravity-defying hair, not even looking at Rodney. He’s chewing on some bread. His expression is archly innocent.

Rodney’s sluggish brain tries to kick into gear, refuses, sputters to a halt and then suddenly makes a giant, dizzying leap. “Are you hitting on me?” he asks. He dimly registers that across the table from Sheppard, Ford was about to open his mouth to say something and now just lets it hang open, but that’s not as interesting by half as Sheppard, who freezes mid-chew, arch expression and relatively relaxed body language preserved like some kind of horribly anachronistic — because of the guns and such — but still kind of pretty oil painting. One of those where the subject is people just sitting there, eating potatoes and such. Rodney’s never felt an interest in a picture like that before.

Sheppard turns slowly, like he does most things when it comes to social interaction. “What?” he asks, once he’s twisted on his bench to face Rodney.

At this point, Rodney is starting to feel like he made an incorrect assumption and made an ass out of himself — too little sleep, too much ass, the balance is off — which is not exactly a _new_ experience for Rodney McKay, PhD PhD, but it’s never a fun one. And he’s tired and these are people he’s started to consider his friends and it’s his team that he’s supposed to be able to rely on, so he kind of feels like it’s probably their fault if they fed him misleading information and he reached an erroneous conclusion. “Well,” he says, hearing himself go huffy, “it’s a reasonable thing to think, isn’t it? I said I was going to bed and you asked _which_ bed, like there’s an _option_, and your voice was all, you know, all drawly-”

“Drawly?” Sheppard repeats, like it’s a ridiculous word, like the height difference between his eyebrows right now isn’t ridiculous, with one of them pushing down and the other arching up. Maybe all of Sheppard’s body hair defies the laws of physics.

Rodney totally isn’t thinking about that right now, though.

“Yes! Your voice, it’s a drawl, and if we add the suffix -y to that we get the adjective _drawly_, which is-”

“Rodney,” Teyla says. She barely raises her voice, but it carries weight and makes him shut up for a second. “Perhaps you should lower your volume. Some of our hosts have already retired for the night and the sleeping quarters are not far from here.”

“Yes,” Rodney says, still feeling uncomfortably like he should be yelling even more to defend himself against possibly imagined slights on his mental capacities, but also suitably chastised. Teyla walks the line between unfailing politeness and implications of bodily harm like no one else he knows. 

He waits a beat, but no one else says anything. They’re all just staring at him.

He keeps his voice down when he continues, awkwardly waving a thumb over his own shoulder in roughly the right direction. “So I’ll just go and- You know. Uh, in my own bed?” 

He’s not sure if he means for that to come out as a question, but he accepts it when it kind of does. Can’t blame a man for trying, and if he’s already felt stupid about it anyway, he may as well double down. Rodney is nothing if not practical.

“Yes, I think that would be best,” Sheppard says, with a lot of ironic emphasis and a little head tilt. Which, well, that’s not a direct no. It’s a _would be best_, which could imply that other options, while perhaps not the _best_, are not necessarily bad.

Rodney watches John for another moment, frustrated and more than a little intrigued, and then remembers that he’s very tired. He’ll figure it out tomorrow. “Okay,” he says. 

“Okay,” Sheppard repeats. Ford is openly snickering now. Teyla is smiling, but in this light it has just a hint of a shark in it.

Rodney nods. “Night, then.” 

Ford and Teyla both tell him some version of sleep well, but Rodney doesn’t really hear them, because he’s looking at Sheppard again, who’s looking back at him with something that Rodney would still have called unreadable a few weeks ago, but that he now suspects to be amusement. Not even mean amusement at his expense, just… amusement. “Goodnight, Rodney,” Sheppard says, and it’s definitely drawly and it has that very specific _Rawdney_ quality that only Sheppard brings to his name.

For reasons Rodney doesn’t think he fully grasps, it tugs at the corners of his mouth. He turns away to hide it — it feels kind of private — and heads through the flame-lit corridors towards the guest quarters.

He’s struggling out of his BDU pants by the time it hits him that he still doesn’t know what Sheppard was all about in the first place, asking about beds. Rodney starts to think about that, but he doesn’t get very far, because he’s asleep pretty much as soon as his back hits the incredibly unergonomic mattress. He dreams of hair that goes the wrong direction and eyebrows that fly at least 200mph and a very specific ass on top of a Ferris wheel, where the wind keeps whispering _Rawdney, Rawdney, Rawdney_.

It’s a very good dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! ❤ If you want to make me a very happy writer, consider leaving a comment. That'd be as cool as Ferris wheels.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com).


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